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EMOTIONALLY ENGAGING STORYTELLING FOR NONFICTION BOOKS
Human Beings are hardwired to feel emotions and that is why we love to be entertained. Entertainment is all about emotions. Writing a novel, requires the ability to elicit certain feelings, whether laughter, tears, or terror. If you are writing a nonfiction book that is purely didactic such as a ‘how to” book and you neglect to weave into your book emotionally rich storytelling, chances are the reader will be less engaged. You need to build rapport with your readers and give them the opportunity to feel an intimacy with you.
For instance, if you are writing a book about how to heal addiction and your content is solely focused on empirical data and various tactics the reader can implement, it might alienate them further as the writing may seem preachy and clinical. Rather, if you share your intimate details of how you overcame addiction you will give them a contextual framework for the tactics expressed in the book.
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In this case, the storytelling will put the reader in the picture. They will relate to your vulnerability, and they will feel an authentic bond with you. This creates trust with you and the reader. Emotional truth fosters empathy.
Entertaining stories hold the attention and can take factual content and make it more tangible and digestible for the reader. The key to successful storytelling is to be able to transmit an embodied experience of the content through somatic writing. Somatic writing is a process of feeling the sensations deep within and writing directly from these feelings. Using the example of the book about healing addiction, your writing might share stories of how drugs or alcohol produced brain fog, persistent sweating, and other somatic sensations. When you describe what it feels like when the sweat dripped off your forehead, the reader may experience a sympathetic resonance with you. They may even sweat while reading.
Author Bio
Jared Rosen is the founder Of DreamSculpt. As an innovator in digital media publishing, he has published over 50 media enhanced e-books for many best-selling authors and filmmakers and has published dozens of books in print. Jared is the author of three books including the groundbreaking book The Flip. As a thought leader he has presented in venues ranging from TED X Malibu, to McKinsey and Company, Sydney, Australia. In 2000, Jared co-created the Children’s Emotional Literacy Project endorsed by Mayor Richard Riordan and Norman Lear.